TWiT 220: Buffet Neutrality

Unsurprisingly, this week’s TWiT starts with talk about the Verizon Droid. Leo notices that a lot of his friends in the tech community seem to be interested, which says a lot for the phone. Mark Milian talks about how the iPhone is often praised as a good pocket personal computer, but Verizon’s network undeniably guarantees that the Droid will be a good phone at square one.

Comcast is now in the business of throttling bandwidth and Frank Barnako can’t help but protest. Since throttling is effectively false advertisement, it negates the purpose of tiered bandwidth plans, which he says are fine as long as they’re fully transparent and honest. That conversation transitions to net neutrality, which amounts to the idealist hope that competition, for instance WiMAX or 4G providers, could bring the system closer to capitalist self-governance with subtle pushes from an outside government organization.

The podcast finishes with a handful of smaller topics, including Ebay’s settlement with the Skype founders, the Hadron Collider, and Modern Warfare 2.